Archives for January 2013

Psychology is a bit of a nuisance. You may think you’ve completely isolated yourself from marketing gimmicks and equipment sales hype, but that is never really possible. Expectations can have profound effects on our perception of quality. This is true for wine just as much as it is for audio equipment. Yes, there is some…… See More

Compression can refer to either dynamic range compression (DRC) or data compression. Data compression can also be either “lossless” or “lossy”. Lossless compression keeps all parts of the original file (.zip or .rar are examples) while lossy compression does not. For example, .mp3 files only have about 10% of the pre-encoding data. All of these…… See More

For an inexperienced audio tech, the sound board can be quite overwhelming. There are knobs and switches, sliders and lights. All of them seem to work together in some sort of harmonic miracle. Depending on the tech’s personality, he or she may play it safe and only adjust what they absolutely know to be benign. The…… See More

If you aren’t familiar with the term dubstep, here is a basic definition. It is a sort of sub-genre of electronic dance music (sometimes abbreviated as EDM). Dubstep is a slower tempo than what we might sometimes think of as club dance music in that songs are almost always about 140 beats per minute (BPM). …… See More

WOK has released Estrima, a plug-in that puts the vintage sound of a string quartet at your fingertips. Available for an introductory price of €9.87, or just a bit over $13 US, it wouldn’t hurt to have these sounds in your library. Take a listen to their samples, this plug-in may be just what you didn’t…… See More